Wireless sensing network has grown from the massive deployment in military or environment surveillance to the household or personal use. For the sensing network to integrate into the household more easily, a home gateway is responsible for collecting the sensing network information and controlling the dependent variable changes. The home messenger acting as the home gateway has become the home sensing collection center.
When more households deploy sensing network elements and home gateway fro collecting information and the user is used to watch home gateway for obtaining the information of home sensing networks. It is important to consider how to provide an access control service on lots of sensing networks employed by the households, so that the user may know the sensing condition even when the user is not at the home messenger.
For a household, the deployed sensors may be divided into different priority categories. For example, the home surveillance sensor has the security degree higher than the temperature and humidity sensor. Also, different members of a household may be allowed to access different information. Therefore, a simple configuration of access control authority is in great demands.
To establish access control requires two fundamental factors, i.e., mutual authentication and access authorization. Authentication is to identify the identity (ID) of the user. The identification of the identity is the basis of any communication. However, even the server knows the identity of the user does not mean that the user may access freely. The user must also be authorized for the target to be accessed before accessing.
The most common secured access control method is to establish authentication and authorization mechanism for each session of the communication path. Cryptography usually uses a key to represent a physical entity, i.e., represent the identity. FIG. 1 shows an exemplary schematic view of an access control method to indicate a user intending to access information on a node in a remote sensing network.
As shown in step 110, a user 101 uses the user ID and password to request access control server (ACS) 103 provided by service provider for access to home gateway 105. At this point, ACS 103 checks the established access control list (ACL). Then the legitimacy of user 101 is checked, as shown in step 120. If legitimate, ACS 103 and home gateway 105 negotiate the session key of this session for user 101, as shown in step 130.
There are two objects of establishing a session key. The first object is to express that ACS 103 has confirmed the legitimacy of user 101 to access home gateway 105, and the second object is to use different key for different session, which helps to maintain the registered secret information will not go public on the communication network as well as providing consistent security quality for each communication.
After a session key is negotiated, user 101 may use the session key to request home gateway 105 for accessing a node i on a home sensing network 107, as shown in step 140. Home gateway 105 then checks whether user 101 has the authority to access node i as shown in step 150. If so, as shown in step 160, home gateway 105 inquires node i for secured communication and receives response information from node i, as shown in step 170. Home gateway 105 further uses the session key to encrypt the information before sending the information to user 101, as shown in step 180. In this manner, the user may safely access remote node i.
Taiwan Patent No. 1258964 disclosed a remote data access control method and system based on AAA mechanism. As shown in FIG. 2, in this access control method, a mobile user requests to the AAA server of local network for authentication (step 21), and each computes the same session key independently (step 22). After AAA server transmits session key and the ID of mobile user to the application server of local network (step 23), the mobile user also transmits the ID to the application server (step 24). Finally, based on the received ID, the application server uses the corresponding session key to establish the channel with the mobile user (step 25).
U.S. Patent Publication No. 2007/0006291 disclosed an authentication mechanism using one-time passwords with single sign-on authentication. As shown in FIG. 3, the authentication mechanism may comprise an authentication proxy server 320 and a user device 300. User device 300 connects to authentication proxy server 320 through a network 330. Through network 330, authentication proxy server 320 may communicate with a third-party authentication server (TPAS) 340 as well as a key distribution center 350. Key distribution center (KDC) 350 at least includes another authentication server (AS) 352 and a ticket granting server (TGS) 354 for updating the user's password and the request, as well as receiving granting ticket and service ticket. The ticket granting server of the authentication mechanism will add loads to the service provider.